A nation still in search of its essence, its truly defined identity and selfhood, requires heroes or people with heroic attributions; people with vision, courage, strength of character and a capacity for selfless service, even self- sacrifice. This is the stuff out of which those who set models; etch a path for great heights for the society, their community and their world, are made of. This is the mould in which heroes are cast—be they political, folk, cultural and spiritual heroes….
In spite of the flux and fluid state of our national incoherence—a situation in which we are yet to structurally define the nature of our national wholesomeness, what people glibly describe as true federalism– we have been visited by people of heroic attributes, even if we have not converted their visitations to instruments of national becoming. Last month, we commemorated the death of one such men who planted themselves in the popular imagination of Nigerians—and in a very short span of life, amidst zest and courage, damning hubris and errors, but unmistakable commitment to the ideals of nationhood. That man was Murtalla Ramat Muhammed—the soldier who became a populist leader and lost his life when the nation needed him most and had just begun to be swept off their feet for the difference that he had just begun to make to the life of the nation.
It is meet– in an age suffering from rank national amnesia and memory lapse; an age in which History, that subject that connects the past with the present and sends signals to the future, has been yanked off the school curriculum by an act of unthought-through policy fiat– that we begin to document, celebrate and serenade the few among us, who have shown a difference in the life of a drifting community. Those few heroes that have walked our earth- people like Dr. Nnamdi Azikiwe, Sir Ahmadu Bello, Herbert Macaulay, Margaret Ekpo, Funmilayo Ransome Kuti, Queen Amina of Zauzau, Aminu Kano, Michael Imuodu, must be brought back to the consciousness of our present and coming generations who are fed only with despicable exploits of the mimic men of today in the corridors of power. It is time to carve a symbolic hall of fame—build Museums with walls and without walls– to house those who fetch fires from the gods to light our national paths—glimpses of which still shed the relic of rays on our horizon today, relieving us the awesome burden of a life of total, blinding darkness.
No doubt, these leaders were, by no means saints. They had their faults, blemishes and short-comings like all mortals—some of those flaws were even of such obvious magnitude that some may wonder why in spite of those failings, they could still pass as heroes, worth ritualizing and ceremonizing. What marks these people out is the balance of probabilities, which when put on relative scales, shows them as dwarfing the rest of us in the stature and profile of the value and quality they bring unto our lives. It is within that context that we remember General Murtalla Muhammed, who matched, with instructive temporal brevity on our national landscape and left memorable signs behind for us to savour.
His art of charismatic leadership, commitment, simplicity, discipline and decisiveness in governance during the short span of his governing aegis of the country until he was cut down by the assassin’s bullet through an unpopular and abortive coup, earned him instant popularity and visibility across the country.
He inherited a state already in the clutches of frustration, disillusionment and despair as the military government of Gowon failed to convert the abundant human and material resources of the country to the benefit and fulfillment- yearnings of the Nigerian people. Here was a government in a period of unprecedented oil-derived wealth but overtaken by stinking opulence of the few rich in the midst of abjection and screaming poverty of the majority. It was a government bereft of vision—a regime which cynically pronounced that money was not its problem but how to spend it—so it wasted it on fripperies and trivia. It was a drifting nation that Murtalla Muhammed shook and jostled awake in July 30, 1975.
General Muhammed ran a dynamic, decisive, forthright, purposeful, action-packed and programmatic regime. His administration’s signature was ‘with immediate effect’. It ramified all his actions. These include the whittling of the civil service, dismissing about 10,000 of the work-force; the setting up of the 50-man Constitution Drafting Committee; his setting aside of the 1973 census and his adoption of the 1963 census figures for official use; his low profile style of governance, shunned of ostentation and opulence that characterized national ruling by his predecessor ( he ordered that no official should ride a car higher the a Peugeot and he remained in his residence rather than moving to the fortress at Dodan Barracks); his federalization of the two national dailies—The Daily Times and The New Nigerian as well as the universities that were in the hands of the regions such as Ahmadu Bello University, University of Ife and University of Nigeria; his creation of additional seven states; the decision to move the Federal capital to Abuja and his ramifying indigenization of the commanding heights of the economy, which also saw to the highly popular nationalization of BP petroleum company. All these, in seven brief moths!—even though the implementation of most of these policies was done after his death by his reluctant (as we were told) but faithful deputy and successor, General Olusegun Obasanjo. There was also, and this is most instructive of his genuineness to be a corrective regime, his transition programme to hand over power to a civilian government in four years and return the military to the barracks after a protracted period of professional rot in politics.
On the international scene, Murtalla’s foreign policy was by and large the most dynamic in Africa in its Nigerian, nay Afro-centric vision. A man determined to remove the shackles of dependence and over-reliance on foreign philosophies and ideologies, General Murtalla threw the weight of Nigeria behind the liberation struggles in Southern Africa. His material support for and recognition of the Popular Movement for the Liberation of Angola (MPLA) attracted the displeasure of the United States of America and Britain as they both frowned on the Communist links of the ruling party of Angola. Many would argue, with a high degree of justification, that his assassination was inseparable from his policy of fierce independence and the unease of Western capitalist forces with his political and economic programmes.
As a result of his fervent nationalism, his reformist, even radical domestic and foreign policies, his swash-bucking forthrightness, his simplicity and daringness in governance, and above all, his long walk from the myopia of a secessionist instinct to a broad patriotic Nigerian nationalism, Murtalla became a folk hero whose memory is indelibly ingrained in the nation’s consciousness. He was one hero whose flaws the nation found easily forgivable and whose dynamic exploits earned him a secured place in the nation’s Hall of Fame.
